Not actually in the toilet, but in a bathroom stall in the women’s washroom at the Butler’s Pantry, a restaurant in the Annex.

The message was scrawled in black pen by some anonymous person who, whether she knows it or not, is a feminist: “You are perfect, sexy and awesome exactly as you are.”

She obviously thought that some women needed to hear that. Thanks, kind feminist stranger, with your gesture both empowering and benign.

It oddly sums up feminism today, an ambiguous and apolitical thing that is everywhere, but with less of the crusading spirit of feminisms past.

After all, it isn’t exactly cool to be a capital-F Feminist in 2010, when many people find the term antiquated and the battle for equality over.

Young Canadian women don’t remember a time before we had the vote, the pill, access to safe abortion and the right to slap on a suit and join the line of worker bees snaking along the highways. We were raised to believe that pink and blue were different sides of the same coin and that we could be, and do, anything men can do. Equality was assumed.

Which makes it difficult to see, sometimes, the systemic inequalities that persist and the new ones that have cropped up, some even as a result of gains made by the women’s movement.

Or, you can see them — Harper’s refusal to fund abortion as part of the G8 maternal health initiative, the still-abysmal numbers of women in the upper echelons of corporations, universities and government, and a popular culture that holds women to absurd and hypersexual standards of beauty, to name but a few.

But tracing these pieces back to the whole is an unpleasant experience. The whole being the fact that men and women aren’t equal yet, despite what our teachers taught us — and despite our post-feminist popular culture of empowered pole dancers (also, because of them).

If we could see that whole, we’d know there is a need for feminism today as much as ever, in part because many of the injustices that remain are so embedded in our cultural conscience that they’re invisible.

As a 26-year-old small-f feminist living in post-women’s lib Canada, I often don’t know what to do about these inequalities; I feel like a bad big sister ignoring someone I love and care about. Someone who needs my help but is annoying as hell.

I was nonetheless disheartened when I asked nearly a dozen of my brilliant female friends if they would call themselves feminists recently and only one responded with a resounding yes.

Even though most of them recognize that gender inequalities persist, they didn’t want to further marginalize themselves by deliberately identifying with a term so many people dislike, even disdain. They just wanted to be treated as people, with a fair shot in life — not as women per se, and certainly not as feminist women.

“I think people associate the term with bra-burning, militant women who hate men — even if that’s not true,” wrote one friend in an email. “And my goal when I’m talking about women’s rights is to help the person understand their importance, not turn them off the subject.”

It’s a more-than-fair point. One that makes my friend a feminist, in spirit if not by title.

My friends are not alone in their reluctance.

Joan Simalchik, professor and coordinator of the Study of Women and Gender program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, says her students give her hope for the future — even though some of them don’t want the feminist label. “It sort of evokes another time for them as a word,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that the essence of it is not there.”

Simalchik says women’s studies is growing as a discipline, with more male students and more graduate programs than ever before. At U of T Mississauga, 260 students took the introductory course this year, in many cases as an elective.

A group of young feminists called the Miss G_Project has been lobbying since 2005 to get a course into the secondary-school curriculum that would introduce students to the history of the women’s rights movements, and the myriad ways sexism manifests itself today.

A gender studies course is now being piloted in a handful of high schools and is slated to become part of the Ontario curriculum in September 2011.The students who take these courses will go on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers, maybe even hockey coaches. And the ideas of equality they learn in gender studies will stay with them.

Young people today identify and organize in different ways than those who came before them, Simalchik says. They might not be feminists or full-time activists, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t organizing on campus and online, and thinking critically about the world around them.

In other words, the knowledge is there, and we’ll use it when we need it — when an issue reaches the tipping point, and we get good and ticked off.

“People don’t claim human rights when they have them, they claim them when they don’t,” Simalchik says.

Even in recent weeks, we’ve seen a backlash against the Conservative government’s decision to deny funding for abortion in developing countries and against the announcement of the all-male Canada Excellence Research Chairs, 19 men but zero women who will receive up to $10 million in federal funding over seven years.

Those protests are movement, but I don’t know if I’d call it a movement.

“I feel like feminism in a way has become very personal,” says Ronak Ghorbani, a self-described feminist and recent co-editor-in-chief of McClung’s, a feminist magazine at Ryerson University. “A lot of the feminists I know are adapting it as a lifestyle, which can also be negative because there is need for political movements on the street. But just because it’s not as in-your-face as it used to be, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”

Feminism today is fragmented. There are as many feminisms as there are feminists, and feminists tend to disagree about what the issues are and should be, and how they should be approached. Often feminists are called to task for racism or elitism: activist Jessica Yee, for example, says contemporary feminism still has a white, Western, academic bias.

As a white, professional woman, certain systemic problems are difficult for me to truly and personally understand. They are deeply upsetting facts, to be read in newspapers and on websites, but difficult to see and touch.

More than 500 Aboriginal Canadian women have been murdered or disappeared in the last 30 years. At least one in three women around the world is beaten, raped or abused in their lifetime. Access to safe and timely abortion is poor in much of the developing world, and even in many U.S. states and parts of rural Canada.

We are often most concerned with problems that cut close our own realities.

Only two years into my career, I find myself worried about working women. About motherhood and how at odds it seems to be with the working world.

As Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the CEO of international gender consultancy 20-first puts it, the problem isn’t the proverbial glass ceiling, but the “gender asbestos” throughout the building.

Wittenberg-Cox says young women soar through the education system, often outperforming their male counterparts, and generally succeeding in the corporate world throughout their 20s. But they hit “culture shock” in their 30s, when they realize how difficult it is to keep up with their male colleagues, especially if they want to be mothers, but even if they don’t.

I can see that coming. And I don’t know what to do about it.

But I do believe we have to stop looking at some of these things as individual choices. It’s great that Canadian women are increasingly starting their own businesses as a means to balance parenting and work, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s truly about choice.

Real choice would allow women — and men — more flexible career paths and more flexible work, with more time for parenting when they need it. Real choice would mean universal child care, something women have been fighting for since the 1960s — something Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s all-day kindergarten plan comes closer to addressing, but not nearly close enough.

It would not mean watching some women penetrate the masculine corporate culture of organizations in order to get a seat at the board table. Instead, we would experience a breakdown of the masculine, haven’t-changed-that-much-since-1960 work patterns and attitudes of companies that continued to put women at a disadvantage.

Wittenberg-Cox, author of How Women Mean Business, tries to haul companies into the 21st century by teaching them how to manage “bilingually” across genders. She says the number 1 thing managers do that unintentionally discriminates against women is identify high-potential employees when they are between 30 and 35 — precisely the time that most women who want to have children are having them, out of the office.

Will the reluctant feminists of my generation start to speak up in their 30s, when these now-hidden injustices reveal themselves? Will the ever-more-educated generation behind us do it?

Will we wait until some new catastrophe rattles us into action?

I do believe that feminism is alive — if not by name — when I think about the bathroom stall, and about many stories in this newspaper, about campus organizing, bloggers and the gentle, venomous reprimands that some of us friendly feminists give loved ones who need to hear them.

And maybe that’s the thing with feminism today. It isn’t what you think it is anymore. It’s become more complicated and more personal. It’s something different to everyone, and it isn’t even feminism to a lot of us. It’s become less of a movement and more a way of seeing things. It’s online. Sometimes it’s misguided, sometimes too tentative.

But it’s still there, and it’s still going.

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